Crowley gained notoriety during his lifetime as a recreational drug experimenter and bisexual.

Crowley was a libertine much like Raniere.

Crowley was bisexual, but exhibited a sexual preference for women, with homosexual relationships being fewer and more in the early part of his life.

He had an attraction toward “exotic women” and in later life, Crowley was able to attract young bohemian women as his lovers. During homosexual anal intercourse, he played the passive role.

Crowley had frequent sex with prostitutes leading to his venereal diseases, much like Raniere’s rumored herpes.

Keith Alan Raniere in his days as the Vanguard

Like Raniere, Crowley exhibited signs of anti-Semitism.

Crowley insulted his Jewish friend, Victor Neuburg, using anti-Semitic slurs and had mixed opinions about Jews. He praised their “sublime” poetry and their “imagination, romance, loyalty, probity and humanity”.

He also said that centuries of persecution led some Jews to exhibit “avarice, servility, falseness, cunning and the rest”

Women were insulted by Crowley’s views of them.

“Crowley described women as “moral inferiors” who had to be treated with “firmness, kindness, and justice”.

Raniere said that women were weak-willed and did not uphold honor like men do. This was the basis of his teachings in SOP and Jness. Indeed, it was Raniere’s idea that DOS, the master-slave group would end the moral inferiority of women, He wanted women to become bad-asses.

People who join one cult are open to joining other cults.
Mark Vicente dabbled in Ramtha and then joined NXIVM.
Sahajo Haertel was in the OSHO cult and then joined NXIVM.

Allison Mack also dabbled in esoteric Eastern religions like Hinduism and Islam.
In this picture Mack has a book open to a Hindu Peace Prayer that goes “Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.”
This book also has a passage from the Islamic Quran.
People who join cults are spiritually and intellectually empty inside.https://www.instagram.com/p/BZLz326BD1f/

I second that thought.
As long as we have a First Amendment that protects Free Speech and Free Press I believe America will do just fine.

As an aside when I was in High School (circa 1974) my Western History teacher, a woman who is now deceased, gave a lecture where she told the class, “When the Roman Army marched into town the old women not only had to lock up the girls for their protection but they also had to lock up the boys.”
So I know that the ancient world had much different ideas about sexuality.

For those of you who don’t know about the Dancing Boys of Afghanistan, in that country grown men dress up 12 to 14 year old boys as women in women’s clothing and make up and make the boys dance.
And then rape the boys.
American troops who witness this sad spectacle or hear the boys screaming are under strict orders not to interfere.
If the American soldiers interfere, they are subject to court martial.

Bacha bazi, also known as bacchá (from the Persian bacheh بچه‌), literally “playing with boys” in Persian, Pashto and Hindi-Urdu), is a form of sexual slavery and child prostitution[2] in which prepubescent and adolescent boys are sold to wealthy or powerful men for entertainment and sexual activities. This business thrives in Afghanistan, where many men keep dancing boys as status symbols.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dancing_Boys_of_Afghanistan

But that’s pretty much where the similarity ends. Crowley was an occultist, bisexual, a world wanderer, and a prolific author. He wrote poetry and fiction as well as his looney occult visions, he rubbed shoulders with painters, sculptors, and writers in Paris, London, and Berlin. He lived in North Africa and the Far East, he bought an estate in Scotland, wore the kilt and passed himself off as a Scottish Laird. He considered himself a gentleman and did not believe in getting paid for teaching the mysteries of the occult. Rainiere is the exact opposite; his “technology” is very much for sale, he wouldn’t know the arts if they bit him on the ass, and preferred to remain glued to the environs of upstate New York, living in a tacky suburban development in Nowheresville, NY. Crowley was an asshole, but he was an asshole with good taste and wide ranging interests. He ran through his fortune by the time he was forty, traveled the world, scaled mountains, and had a grand time. He inspired a Somerset Maugham novel, The Magician.

Crowley is interesting. Rainiere is not; he’s a money-grubbing little man whose vision of the good life never went beyond sleeping most of the day, eating pizza, and getting laid. He’s mercenary, he loves money, but doesn’t know what to do with it, other than lose it in bad investments. See the world? Nah, he’d rather sprawl on a dirty couch and watch reruns of Star Trek. The man led the most uninteresting life imaginable and the most remarkable thing about him is that he managed to screw up so spectacularly. Hannah Arendt famously wrote of “the banality of evil”; Raniere would be the perfect contemporary illustration of the concept except I can’t elevate his tawdry nastiness to the level of Evil.

I’m no defender of Aleister Crowley, he hit his wife and sacrificed small animals. The only reason I have posted about him is in response to other posts. Just to correct the record. In the popular imagination Crowley is this great evil, a Satanist and the opponent of all that is good and holy. In fact he was not a Satanist, he was a Pagan. And yes, there is a difference. The son of fanatically religious parents, he rebelled against the restrictive Victorian moralism of his youth. He was Gay in both senses of the word. He was an interesting eccentric whereas Keith Raniere is a surpassingly dull felon. Rainier is perhaps the least interesting racketeer in the history of racketeering. He ruined lives and burned through others’ money for nothing, not even for the sake of a grandiose lifestyle for himself. The man is literally a waste of space.